Farhad Manjoo

Smartphones keep getting faster. If you buy a new high-end phone this year, you’ll find it’s noticeably more powerful than last year’s best gadgets. It will let you run much more demanding apps, it will load up web pages more quickly, and it will deliver sharper, more advanced videos and games.

This might not sound like a big deal — aren’t new gadgets always faster than old gadgets? Yes, that’s true. But what’s striking about phones is how quickly they’re getting quicker. This year’s top-of-the line phones are likely to be twice as fast as those released last year. And last year’s phones weren’t slouches — they were twice as powerful as the ones that came out in 2011. This pace is remarkable. Indeed, if you study the speed increases of smartphones over time, you notice a thrilling trend: Phones are getting faster really, really fast — much faster, in fact, than the increase in speed in the rest of our computers.

If you scrutinise this quickening pace, though, you’re bound to get disillusioned. One of the reasons phones have been getting faster is that they’re also getting bigger. A bigger phone allows for a bigger battery, which allows for a faster processor. But now we’ve hit a wall in phone size: Today’s biggest and fastest phones carry screens of around 5 inches, and they’re not going to get any bigger than that. (If they did, they wouldn’t fit in your hand, and would thus be phablets.)

So if the size of our phones — and, thus, the size of their batteries — is now fixed, phone makers (and phone buyers) must make a sharp trade-off. Over the next few years, at least until someone develops better battery technology, we’re going to have to choose between smartphone performance and battery life. Don’t worry — phones will keep getting faster. Chip designers will still manage to increase the speed of their chips while conserving a device’s power. The annual doubling in phone performance we’ve seen recently isn’t sustainable, though. Our phones are either going to drain their batteries at ever-increasing rates while continuing to get faster — or they’re going to maintain their current, not-great-but-acceptable battery life while sacrificing huge increases in speed. It won’t be possible to do both.

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To understand how incredibly fast phones have been getting, let’s look at some numbers. There are lots of ways to measure the power of computers. One of the most popular is a program called Geekbench, which tests the processor and memory of a machine and spits out an overall performance score. Such “benchmark” scores don’t necessarily correspond to how a specific machine will perform in all situations — if you run a buggy app on a fast phone it will be slow — but they’re helpful in painting a picture of a device’s potential.

Primate Labs, the company that makes Geekbench, has posted a handy database of scores on its site — a way to see how various phones, tablets, and desktop and laptop PCs stack up. According to the site, the first and second iPhones, which Apple released in 2007 and 2008, earned Geekbench scores of 136 and 137, respectively. Compared with PCs, these scores were terrible — the first couple iPhones were slower than any Mac that Apple put out in all of the 2000s. (One of the early clamshell iBooks, which Apple released way back in 2000, scored 176 on Geekbench.)

But then, in 2009, the iPhone began to take off. The iPhone 3GS got a Geekbench score of 276, twice as fast as its predecessor. The iPhone 4 was about 33 per cent faster than that, and the iPhone 4S, released in 2011, was nearly twice as fast as that. Then, late last year, Apple released the iPhone 5, whose 1599 Geekbench score more than doubled the 4S’s mark, and edged out every other phone on the market, too. Compare that with the original iPhone’s 136, and the progress is remarkable: In the five years between the first iPhone and the iPhone 5, Apple increased the speed of the device by a factor of 12.

In fact, the S4’s score is high enough that just a few years ago, it would have ranked as a pretty respectable full-fledged PC. Apple’s 2009-era MacBook Pro, for instance, scored around 3200 on Geekbench. In other words, today’s fastest phones are comparable to four-year-old high-end laptops.

If next year’s phones can again double their performance — scoring around 6300 on Geekbench—they’d be comparable to MacBook Pros released in 2012. That would put the fastest phone at just two years behind high-end laptops. Then, if smartphones can again double their speed to hit 12600 on Geekbench, they’d be just as fast as today’s best MacBook, the 15-inch high-resolution “Retina” model.

But I doubt that will happen. As thrilling as it is to consider a limitless horizon for smartphone performance, we’re already starting to see phones struggle to keep up with their current superfast chips. The HTC One, for instance, has gotten raves for its performance, but early reviews suggest its battery has trouble going all day with anything more than light usage. Battery tests on the Samsung Galaxy S4 show that it can last a full day for heavy users, which is pretty good — but that’s primarily due to the fact that Samsung squished a bigger battery into the phone compared with last year’s S3. Samsung isn’t going to have much room left in the Galaxy to do that next year. Instead, then, it will face a choice: Will it try to double the phone’s performance once more, or will it try to maintain a day’s battery life?

Different phone makers will make different choices, I suspect. Some companies will go for raw speed to attract geeks who care about specs. Others will market their devices according to what they can do rather than how fast they can do it. Apple, in particular, has long taken pains to maintain its devices’ battery life from year to year, so it might focus on usability rather than attempting to set the smartphone land-speed record.

But be warned: You, as a phone buyer, will have to make a choice. The most powerful phones are going to be much more pleasant to use than everything else on the market — until about lunchtime, when you’ll need to recharge them. The phones with the longest battery life, on the other hand, might stutter as you put them through their paces, and they won’t let you play the latest games or other demanding apps — but at least they’ll be around when you need them at midnight.

Which is better, a fast phone or a long-lived one? I really don’t know. I want both. But the days when you can have the best of both worlds in one package will soon be gone.

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55 comments

Why can't they just make the phones a bit thicker? 7-8mm is arguably too thin for a 5" phone anyway. My GS3 actually feels more comfortable with the Samsung extended (3000mah) battery and lasts twice as long on a charge.

Commenter

Adam F

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 10:15AM

Agreed. That's why the Lumia 920s feel so good in the hand imo.

Commenter

Luke16

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 10:38AM

But be warned: You, as a phone buyer, will have to make a choice.

OR just buy another battery for < 10$ on ebay :) I bought one 2 years ago for my SGS2 and it's still running fine. Downside is you have to carry an extra battery but hey, it's better than carry a charger/cable all the time.

Commenter

207k

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 10:46AM

Spot on. We did not need a thinner iPhone. We needed one that could last a whole day. The new Samsung is starting to look pretty good.

Commenter

Tim

Location

South Yarra

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 11:17AM

They will have to double in thickness every year...not really a sustainable solution.

The good thing is that it puts more pressure on battery development - smaller, lighter and with many more Joules...and then I guess we will be facing more battery melt downs and small disasters like the aeroplane that was grounded recently as battery power density improves, concentrating a lot of energy in a small package.

"Is that a phone or a little atomic bomb you have in your pocket?"

Commenter

Continuous

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 11:29AM

Agree 100% - I'd happy have a phone that's a few mm thicker and few grams heavier if it means I get longer battery life. Perhaps the phone companies need to ask their customers what they actually want, instead of telling us what we should buy.

Commenter

SG

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 11:37AM

Make them thick enough - at least at the top end - for AAA batteries. Or even AAs.

Commenter

AWLor0

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 11:40AM

You don't need to make phones thicker, just make better use of available space. Since an iphone does not have a user serviceable battery it doesn't need to be rectangular, you could theoretically have the battery weaving its way all through the phone to increase battery life.

Commenter

DamienF

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 11:40AM

Agree. Its amazed me that no (primary) phone manufacturer has tried to market a thicker version of its phone. They've focused much of there energy in trying to fit more pixels into slightly thinner phones to the point where both achievements are meaningless to the end user.

Why doesn't the Galaxy S4 or the iPhone5 come out in two models? One thin and with a battery that lasts a day and the other a few mm thicker and it battery lasts two days. Let the consumer decide what is important to them...

Commenter

Peter

Location

Oz

Date and time

March 28, 2013, 11:47AM

I agree, and I don't think this is a very good article.

The Note I and II are phablets and fit comfortably in your hand.

The Galaxy III with moderate use gets a few days battery life. Not sure what he's going on about.